The fast Track

FOR THOSE OF US keen to live long and well, few topics tantalise more than intermittent fasting (IF). Clearly, the evidence is strengthening that eating less than you normally would – not always, just sometimes – does wondrous things to your body, raising the likelihood you’ll be kicking a ball with your great-grandkids shortly after humans colonise Mars.

At the pointy end of the IF debate is British physician and science journalist Michael Mosley, the personable populariser of its most celebrated version: the 5/2 diet. For Mosley, the adventure started in 2012 when a BBC project nudged him into the orbit of Mark Mattson, an American neuroscientist who’d been researching fasting for more than a decade. Mattson believed you could slow ageing by slashing food consumption by roughly 75 per cent on two days per week while eating normally on the other five.

Mosley, who’d recently been diagnosed with type-2 diabetes and was seeking alternatives to life-long medication dependence, put himself on